NEW YORK — A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo of her asleep in a bed could make history Thursday when it goes on sale by Sotheby’s in New York.

With an estimated price of $40 million to $60 million, “El sueño (La cama)” – in English, “The Dream (The Bed)” — may surpass the top price for a work by any female artist when it goes under the hammer. That record currently stands at $44.4 million, paid at Sotheby’s in 2014 for Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1.”

The highest price at auction for a Kahlo work is $34.9 million, paid in 2021 for “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera.

Her paintings are reported to have sold privately for even more.

The painting up for auction depicts Kahlo asleep in a wooden colonial-

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